Personally to me, workflow managers (WFM) have most value for automating repetitive tasks where adjustment of parameters or user intervention is basically never necessary. Good examples are mentioned read mapping, or sorting of files, anything that just runs some tools by default settings. Or situations where things are tedious, for example a number of intermediate files need to be created, collated, ordered in some way so downstream tools can run.

If it comes down to run a couple of one-liners on the command line then the added effort of implementing this in a WFM might be overkill.